Although he received lots of press after settling in New York, Lead Belly sold few records before his death in 1949 and was unaware of the legacy he would leave behind. Shortly after he died, Pete Seeger and his group, The Weavers, helped launch the folk-blues revival with their cover of Lead Belly’s rueful love song, “Goodnight, Irene.” In the rock era, everyone from Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin took something from Lead Belly.
The Smithsonian Folkways Collection is an impressive set of five CDs of recordings from the 1940s, including several that had never been released. Packaged in a hardcover album-size format, the Collection includes essays, discography, photographs, press clippings and reproductions of concert posters and picture sleeves—all of which help bring Lead Belly’s final years to life. Some newspaper reporters (as well as his managers) treated him as a freak show, making him sound like a talented homicidal maniac. His real story was as interesting as the fiction. Twice, in different states, Lead Belly was pardoned from prison farms on the strength of his singing. East Coast liberals embraced him after songcatchers John and Alan Lomax brought him to New York, but the urban black audience wanted nothing to do with an old Southern man who reminded them of everything they wanted to escape.
As the Collection’s press clippings show, Lead Belly was labeled as everything from “King of the Blues” to a “Negro minstrel.” Hard to categorize, Lead Belly was a walking repository of African American song from a slightly earlier era. He knew spirituals and work songs, children’s numbers and the kitbag of juke joint tunes that set the stage for the blues. His performances were as rugged yet dignified as the performer. Influenced by the Café Society milieu of his final years, he wrote protest songs such as “Scottsboro Boys” and “The Bourgeois Blues,” but what remains most familiar are Southern-rooted songs that later entered the rock music canon, including “The Midnight Special” and “House of the Rising Sun.”
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